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On Thursday, two researchers plan to reveal an unpatched iPhone bug that could virally infect phones via SMS.

If you receive a text message on your iPhone any time after Thursday afternoon containing only a single square character, Charlie Miller would suggest you turn the device off. Quickly.

That small cipher will likely be your only warning that someone has taken advantage of a bug that Miller and his fellow cybersecurity researcher Collin Mulliner plan to publicize Thursday at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas. Using a flaw they've found in the iPhone's handling of text messages, the researchers say they'll demonstrate how to send a series of mostly invisible SMS bursts that can give a hacker complete power over any of the smart phone's functions. That includes dialing the phone, visiting Web sites, turning on the device's camera and microphone and, most importantly, sending more text messages to further propagate a mass-gadget hijacking.

"This is serious. The only thing you can do to prevent it is turn off your phone," Miller told Forbes. "Someone could pretty quickly take over every iPhone in the world with this."

Though Miller and Mulliner say they notified Apple ( AAPL - news - people ) about the vulnerability more than a month ago, the company hasn't released a patch, and it didn't respond to Forbes' repeated calls seeking comment.

All the cell phones and PDA's are a bit lacking in security...probably even Obumbles.

It's not too hard to get a person using one for internet access to log into a "site", where that "site" copies their sim card.

I agree 100%. I remember reading a story a few months back where some of our State Department folks went over to China for something, everyone of those Blackberry's came back with trojan crap on them because they all had wifi turned.

I think that this is the pedophiles' response to the new IPhone app that lists the know addresses and pictures of all the child molesters within a 5 mile radius of the phone. We know what nefarious bastions of intellectual evil they are...